referencing not plagiarising

Referencing and citing and copyright.

tutor: Mike Horne FGS

for the Centre for Life Long Learning

If you refer to other peoples' work in your work then you need to acknowledge the original source. There are good reasons for doing this - it is firstly good manners as by referencing their work you are thanking them; you are also helping the readers by pointing them towards the original source of the information so that they can 'go to the source'; and you are showing that you can uphold academic standards by not passing off other peoples' work and ideas as your own (i.e. you are not a plagiarist).

Everything that has been written, drawn or pictured is copyright, whether it has been published or not. The copyright belongs to someone (unless it is quite old -- over fifty years old or over fifty years after death of author --- see copyright laws about this) and they have control over its use. Just because you have bought a copy of the book, memorised the words of a song or downloaded a web page you cannot do what you like with it. The copyright owners may state in a copyright statement what they will permit you to do with the material. For instance I am happy for you to use my publications for any non-commercial educational use as long as you do not alter it, but I will not allow any commercial use of the material without prior permission. So quoting my work in an advertisement without permission is theft (even though I have published for all to see on the Internet) and 'cutting and pasting' parts of my work into your web-page as if you had written it is theft and paraphrasing my ideas in your essay as if they are your own is also theft (= plagiarism).

There are slightly different standards that apply according to who you are writing for (though I am not sure whether this is written down in the copyright laws). If you wish to reproduce a drawing from a book in your work, you must get written permission from the copyright holder if you are going to publish your work. If you are putting it into an essay that you are writing as part of a educational course that would be 'acceptable' as long as you cite and reference the source. There is a 'grey area' in between - i.e. when you are printing a small number of 'handouts' for use by others or putting the information onto a poster for a temporary display to a selected audience - this seems to be acceptable as long as you are not charging for it yourself if the original source is educational rather than commercial. So within an educational setting I could probably print off a copy of a diagram from a journal for each student but I couldn't sell them a CD of my favourite music that I have compiled from CDs I have bought! In all of the above cases we must tell the reader/recipient where we got the information.

In our work we must state where the concept, information, diagram, data &c. was original published. There are several ways of citing and referencing - the two main ones are 'footnotes' and 'Harvard' or of course you could always invent your own. When writing for a journal or for academic study you should follow the required convention; the journal will publish a set of instructions for authors. Academic department should have a handbook that its tutors and students should follow [note the use of the word "should" here - because some tutors/lecturers will pedantically set their own standards!].

The 'footnote system' is fairly simple - each time you cite a source you give it a number and then you give the reference for that number at the bottom of the page or at the end of the essay/chapter or at the end of the book. The references are usually listed in the order that you used them in - reference 1 was used first and if you refere to it again later it will have the same number. Or you could arrange your list of references alphabetically and renumber them accordingly. On the face of it this looks quite easy - just list the references as you use them, but to me this seems to be an inflexible system because you have to renumber every citation if you insert one in a later draft. This method does seem to be preferred in the social sciences and 'popular' publications. The style of the actual references can vary - sometimes with the title of the article/book before the author's name.

The 'Harvard' system is the one I prefer and seems to be standard in many scientific journals.

The citation consists of the author's name and date of publication. If you refer to the author in your text then the date is given in brackets. If you don't mention the author in the text then the complete citation goes in the brackets. If there are two authors name them both; for more than two list the first followed by 'et al.' or 'and others'; separate multiple citations with commas or semicolons.

Examples-

In 1989 Jones described...
Jones (1989) described
It has been previously described (Jones 1989, Smith & Weston 2001, Swerrigen et al. 1999) ...
In her book 'The geology of Goole' Nesbith (1777) described ...

The references are listed at the end of the essay, chapter or book, with the author(s) name(s) first, followed by the publication date, then the title of the book or article, followed by the publisher or title of the journal, followed by the page numbers. The title of the main publication is normally in italics (if you are writing using a computer) or underlined (if handwritten or typewritten). There do seem to be varying conventions about putting the authors into capitals, whether to put commas before that date, whether to put full stops after author's initials, whether the volume number of the journal should be in bold, &c.

Examples

Anon. 1993. New 'observatory' for the Humber. Bulletin [of the University of Hull] 19,4.
Horne M, 1991. [Rifle Butts SSSI]. Humberside Geologist 8, 30.
Horne M, 1991. The Structure of the Yorkshire Wolds. p 9-10 of L H Emery, M J Horne & F Whitham - Flamborough Coastal Area [Field Meeting] 16 June 1991. Yorkshire Geological Society.
Horne M & R Harrison, 1991. A Geological Walk in the City of Hull. Humberside Geologist 8, 21-25.
Hurst A, H D Johnson, S D Burley, A C Canham & D S Mackertich (eds) 1996. Geology of the Humber Group: Central Graben and Moray Firth, UKCS. Special Publication 114, Geological Society, London.
Jarvis I G, M Carson, E Cooper, M B Hart, P N Leary, B A Tocher, D Horne & A Rosenfeld 1988 Microfossil Assemblages and the Cenomanian-Turonian (late Cretaceous) Oceanic Anoxic Event. Cretaceous Research, 9, 3-103.
Jones, H., 2006: Devoted to his studies [obituary for J W Neale]. Hull Daily Mail Wednesday 25th January 2006, page 12.
Mortimore R 2005. What have we done to the Yorkshire Chalk? [audio] Humberside Geologist Special Publication no. 1 (CD ROM)
Myerscough R, 1991. Geology. p 7-14 of Lewis B [ed.] 1991. The Yorkshire Coast. Normandy Press.
Neave S & Ellis S 1996. An historical atlas of East Yorkshire. University of Hull Press.
Notkin K [web page viewed May 2001] Chambers Fit For A Queen : Hunting For Fossils In The English Rain. http://www.rockhounds.com/rockgem/articles/ammonites.html
Pacey N I, 1989. Organic matter in Cretaceous Chalks from eastern England. Chemical Geology 75, 191-208.
[Robinson E] 1996. The Chalk Way nearer to celebration. Geologists' Association Circular 919, 9-10.
Taxon C, 2005. Jurassic & Cretaceous fossils of South Ferriby and East Yorkshire. 20pp. Privately printed, Sheffield.

Variations -

the names of the authors may have to be in UPPER CASE and/or bold
the initials of the authors may have to before their family name
the initials of the authors may require a full stop after them [e.g. P. D. James or James, P.D.]
the volume number of a journal may have to be in bold
the part number of the journal may be included (perhaps in brackets)
publication date might be at the end of the reference

These are all generally acceptable in themselves. We should however endeavour to adopt a consistent style throughout. The style I prefer is not to reduce the punctuation, not use capitals in the names of authors, not include 'part numbers' in volumes of journals and not use bold for volume numbers. Sometimes I put authors and titles in bold to emphasise them.

You will notice a few other conventions in the list above:

it is an alphabetical list
where an author is cited more than once the references are listed by date
where there is more than one piece by the author in a year they are then arranged alphabetically
multiple authorships are usually listed after single authorships
where there are several multiple authorships they are sorted alphabetically by authors, then by date and then by title if necessary.
anonymous publications are listed at the top of the list with the author as 'Anon.' or 'Anonymous'.
If you add extra information to the reference yourself (such as author's name when it was published anonymously, extra details to explain the title, extra details about the journal, &c.) then that should be in square brackets to show you have added it.

There are a few similar conventions when you quote other peoples' work in your text-

books, journal names, foreign words should be in italics or underlined (as above)
if you add any of your own words to make the meaning clearer then they should be in square brackets.
if you add any missing words they should be in square brackets
your should indicate if you have missed bits out with three dots ... like that!
if there is a mistake in the original you should copy it and put the word sic in brackets to indicate that you know it is a mistake in the original and not an error you have introduced!
if you have amended a diagram (or something like that) then describe the new version as being "after " or "based on the work of " the original author(s).

Referencing works that are not printed on paper (such as websites, CDs, displays) or are frequently published (such as newspapers), or are ephemeral (leaflets or news websites), or have limited distribution (such as course notes or field trip handouts), or are not published (manuscripts or a thesis), or music or paintings, or films, or radio programs, or 'podcasts', may not be easy. So you just have to do the best you can to help the reader - stating when and where you you saw, heard or read it.

Some 'publications' change with time: if a web-page does not have a "last updated" date on it then state the date that you accessed it.

Sometimes we may not know about the original source; there are some reasons for this:

We are looking at a secondary source - the book we are reading itself is quoting from an older source that you cannot obtain. For this we could reference it as "Bloggs 1897 quoted in Jones 2002".
The source we are reading is not properly referenced - this often occurs in 'popular' books - books written in an informal style for the public rather than for an academic audience.
Some of the bibliographic information is missing - e.g. many books I have read that were published between 1900 and 1920 do not seem to have a publication date in them. Here the best you can do is to estimate the date but indicate the uncertainty with a question mark.
It has become common knowledge and the source is not quoted.

Common or accepted knowledge does pose a problem:- when is a theory or fact so 'accepted' that we no longer need to reference it? Should I cite Darwin whenever I mention evolution or Milankovitch whenever I mention cyclicity? Probably not because I would spend all my time citing quite old publications. But there are a few pitfalls to be aware of:-

in some sciences the published work is extremely important - the naming of animals, plants and fossils pedantically involves listing ALL previously published works.
some 'accepted facts' are 'urban myths' - they are just not true (such as 'Eskimos having 88 names for snow')
some 'accepted facts' are inaccurate (the BBC television program QI exploits this in a humorous way)
many accepted facts come from the 'conclusions' of a publications rather than the data and such words as 'might be, possibly, probably' get left out when the conclusion becomes an accepted theory or fact.
we do not question 'accepted facts' - if we did ignore them we might get a very different answer
do not be tempted to create your own new accepted fact - "As everybody knows there is ..." or "It is generally agreed that ..." will actually make me start to question the validity of that statement and once I start I wonder about the whole work!

We must think carefully about why we are citing and referencing and perhaps word the citations differently accordingly -

we are acknowledging the original authorship and indicating it is not our work
we are telling the reader where the data came from
we are informing the readers where they can find further information

We can also use citations and references in a fake way to make our work look more impressive, fill space and make us appear "well read". This will often backfire, particularly if we cite things that we could not have possibly read ourselves then the reader starts to question the originality of the whole of our work.

Remember that there is a difference between a list of references and a bibliography - references are for documents we have used in our work; a bibliography is a list of material that might be of interest to the reader.

[Hint - for reports submitted to me and generally in geological publications citations and references should usually be kept to a minimum: a factual report of where you got the information you used from rather than a big "impressive" bibliography.]

Mike Horne

Hull, UK

October 2008

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